How passionate are you about your work in FE?

How passionate are you about your work? If you’re in any doubt, DON’T google it. A five-minute word-search will turn your uncertainty into neurosis. Courses, articles and advice abound on Why Passion Is Important in the Workplace, on Passionate People Making A Positive Difference, 7 Creative Ways to Stay Passionate at Work and How to Feel Passionate About What You Do … When you come across Reawakening Your Passion for Work in the Harvard Business Review you know it’s serious. When you stumble on Why Being Passionate About Your Job Isn’t Everything, you know the title’s really telling you, actually it is.

It wasn’t always so. We didn’t always use to think of being passionate as a good thing. Writing in the seventeenth century Robert Burton referred to Passions and perturbations of the mind rectified[i]. Being passionate was something to be cured of. Guided by no less a figure than Plato, Burton thought of passion as an unruly horse requiring firm control: I may not deny but our passions are violent, and tyrannise of us, yet there be means to curb them; though they be headstrong, they may be tamed.

Well into the twentieth century Yeats wrote famously that The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity[ii]: still not sounding good, is it? And much more recently still, Philip Hensher commented on how our recent change of mind might distort understanding our cultural heritage: If most modern audiences are unable to move beyond a sense of Mozart’s ‘Così fan tutte’ as a story of motiveless cruelty and helpless suffering, that may well be because we, unlike thinkers during the Enlightenment, no longer have any sense of the passions as things that may be examined, studied and controlled.[iii]

So what’s best? Should we cultivate passion in and for what we do? Or should we treat strong feeling with suspicion and work on maintaining a calm rationality? If we were leading monks in Buddhist monasteries, not staff in colleges, the answer would be straightforward but an essential task for FE leaders is precisely to encourage strong attachment in their staff for the corporate mission. It’s the starting point for attaining excellence and our teachers and trainers are not, in the words of Joni Mitchell, some stone commission / Like a statue in a park, but flesh and blood and vision[iv] and they need leaders who can inspire and motivate. A bit of passion comes in very handy for that.

If a college’s ‘Values’ are genuinely just that then the notion of strong feeling is almost entailed but in other leadership contexts passion is likely to be a hindrance, not a help. When still semi-damp behind the ears as a new college principal I had a go at meeting the strong feelings of staff with strong feelings of my own and only made matters worse. I learnt quickly that it didn’t work and over time, that throwing light on the problem was never possible until you dissipated the heat.

The reason passion doesn’t work as persuasion is because strong feelings tend to deafen us to anyone but ourselves. Not hearing the person you’re talking to is a poor starting point for trying to change their mind. And for the same reason strong feelings make for poor decisions. They distort reality, exaggerating what gratifies them, minimising what doesn’t and blurring important differences and distinctions. Passionate belief doesn’t change the facts, it just inclines you to ignore them – until the inevitable collision comes. Above all, strength of feeling weakens self-knowledge. It makes it harder to see that you’re wrong and therefore much, much easier to make mistakes. Even quite bad ones.

One has to be alive to the possibility there’s more wisdom in the works of Mozart than in those of the Harvard Business School. Passion has its place in promoting a college’s mission and core values but compassion is far likelier to succeed with staff and woe is highly likely to betide if you’re not dispassionate in managing the business!

[i] Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, 1621

[ii] W.B. Yeats, The Second Coming, 1919

[iii] Philip Hensher, School for Lovers, Guardian, 23.5.09

[iv] Joni Mitchell, Come in From the Cold, 1991